The real "Bridget Jones'?

Published 4:00 am, Monday, June 21, 1999

Author Helen Fielding hates having to keep answering the same dumb question: Is she Bridget Jones, her most popular creation?

It's just so obvious she's not - though she is funny, sexy, single, British and over 30 (well, 40).

Just off a flight from New York, Fielding lands at The Examiner, the first San Francisco stop on her latest book tour (this time promoting the paperback version of her surprise bestseller, "Bridget Jones's Diary" ) with not a wrinkle in her pale gray suit, not a blond hair out of place, not a chink in the ironic humor that protects her privacy (she's single, and that's all she'll say about that). Oh, and she's sober, too.

Bridget would surely have smears of her favorite Milk Tray chocolates around her mouth, be smoking furiously, have a dreadful hangover or be on the phone checking her messages for the 33rd time in case the latest object of her obsessions had called. At the same time, she'd be keeping track of herself in her diary, promising daily to start that diet, cut down on the "alcohol units" or develop

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She's the sitcom-type, 30-something professional single woman - singleton, in Fielding's coinage - who's got grand ambitions, and it's an open joke that she never lives up to them. She's the one who says, "I'm never going to sleep with him again," and then in the next scene, is in bed with him.

In other words, she's spectacularly human - and you can't help liking her.

"I think what Bridget is - it's the bit of you that's inside and worried and unsure and confused. I think there's that bit in most people. And the people that haven't got that bit - I think I don't like them very much," said Fielding, serious for a rare second, explaining why Bridget's become such a phenom not only in England but in the United States, Japan, Italy, France and most of the rest of the Western world.

"I suppose what it's doing is taking that bit and exaggerating and blowing it up and really having a good look at it and laughing about it," said Fielding.

"Bridget" in hardback (Viking Penguin) spent most of last year on the best-seller list. Now she's back in paper, just in time for beach reading season.

Fielding's also well along on a sequel, as yet untitled. This time Bridget's in a relationship - at the start anyway.

"But we see what really happens when you go off into the sunset with the guy," she said.

And then there's the movie, in development by the British production company Working Title - of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" fame. Fielding wrote two drafts of the screenplay, with help from ex-beau and good friend Richard Curtis, who wrote "Notting Hill" from the office they share in that London neighborhood.

Now the screenplay's being overhauled by Andrew Davis, who wrote the BBC's "Pride and Prejudice" screenplay. Perfect, Fielding says, since she stole Jane Austen's plot outright for "Bridget."

Casting will start soon. Such names as Helena Bonham Carter, Kate Winslet and Minnie Driver are floating around as possible Bridgets. Fielding says she'd love to find someone new - but in any case, "I think she shouldn't be too young or too thin."

If all this seems a little much for some single-girl comedy, consider this: Fielding, single-handedly, has been credited with launching a whole new genre of books (Melissa Bank's "The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing," Kate Christensen's "In the Drink," Suzanne Finnamore's "Otherwise Engaged," to name just a few), TV shows ( "Sex and the City," "Ally McBeal" ) - a whole new world of over-30 single women who live in the real world. No longer tragic barren spinsters, they are sexy, out-there, always on the trail of self-improvement and laughing at their foibles.

"One of my favorite lines in the book is when Bridget goes, "There is nothing so unattractive to a man than strident feminism.' She's just so provocative," Fielding says. But she adds:

"Surely we can laugh at ourselves, or we're not very equal. And why can't we have female comic heroines? You know, nobody says that P.G. Wodehouse's heroes are an insult to the state of manhood and going to lead everyone astray."

For herself, Fielding will admit only to picking up on the cultural zeitgeist and getting lucky.

What became her bestseller started as a column in the London Independent.

"Initially, I thought the column would last just six weeks and then I'd be sacked for being trivial - and so did everyone else," Fielding contends. Instead, it snowballed, Fielding rewrote the columns into the book and hit the road.

She was especially surprised that American women - and some of the men who love them - took to it.

"Nobody in the U.K. thought it would work in America. There was even an open letter in one of the papers saying, "Don't go there, they don't understand self-deprecation and irony,' " Fielding recalled, adding, "That's so not true."

She never thought Bridget would conquer Japan.

"I mean, even identifying with the dieting, when they're all so thin and they just eat little bits of fish. That was a complete surprise to me," Fielding said.

"Italy was a worry. I don't know what happened in the translation, but the journalists there took it terribly seriously. One asked me if it was a "transcendental study of existential despair.' So of course I said yes. I was delighted. I've never been taken so profoundly in my life."

She thought Californians would be turned off by Bridget's smoking.

"In California, if you ask if you can smoke it's like, "Why don't you urinate on our children?' " Fielding said. Wrong again. The Bay Area has been one of Bridget's biggest fans, according to Penguin.

Bridget's popularity has meant nonstop travel for Fielding, answering the same questions over and over, subjecting herself to magazine photographers who keep trying to force her into skimpier and sexier clothing.

Everyone wants her to be Bridget.

Sure, she counted calories in her diary when she was at Oxford (carrot, 10, Milk Tray, 3,848).

"Quite often, people expect me to be blind drunk and fall off the chair giggling and then try to smoke and then try to snog them and, you know, be constantly eating chocolate - and there's actually nothing could be further from the truth," she said. Skillful as she is in using humor to deflect any personal probing, it's hard to know what to make of that.

For all of Bridget's fame, Fielding said, "The good thing about being a writer is that you're not really a celebrity. Nobody recognizes you in the street. So you have the best of both worlds."

Just before flying to San Francisco, Fielding did the

"Today" show and ran into a crowd of autograph hunters.

"So I sort of took a big breath and resolved to be rather gracious about it. Then I looked over my shoulder, and there was Bob New-hart," she laughs.&lt;